Friday, October 25, 2013

Health Care and Shutdown Debacles Are Mere Symptoms

Many
reporters caught up in the bizarre world of official Washington have
written extensively on political tactics and implications of the
so-called government shutdown and disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov.
Typical was a New York Times headline that blared "Republicans, Sensing
Weakness in Health Law Rollout, Switch Tactics."

But there's been precious little analysis about the underlying
realities that led us to this point. Perhaps that's because neither
political party wants to face up to those realities. So, instead of
substance, D.C. journalists cover politics like junior high school
students trying to keep up with who's in, who's out, and who likes who.

Admittedly, dealing with reality is hard. But ignoring it is even worse.

For example, many problems with the HealthCare.gov website can be
traced directly to a problem with the law itself, not the computer
coding. Reports indicate that government officials directed the site
designers to require people to sign up first before being able to
explore pricing options. Later, when an upfront way to get pricing
information was added, it was structured to deliberately understate the
actual costs for most people.

No private business would attract customers this way, but it was not a
programming glitch. The real problem is that the prices for insurance
offered under the "Affordable Care Act" guidelines are just too high to
attract consumers. The political challenge was how to cover up this
reality.

The disconnect can be seen in the president's sales pitch as well. He
points out, correctly, that young healthy Americans should have health
insurance because one unforeseen accident could wipe them out
financially. However, that's an argument for a relatively inexpensive
major medical policy that covers only the big expenses. Unfortunately,
the president's law does not allow them to buy such a policy.

This is a problem that computer programmers can't solve. It's not the
website that's broken, it's the law. Until consumers are empowered to
make their own health care spending decisions, the problems will remain.

A similar problem can be found with Republican efforts to reduce federal spending.

For four decades, official government accounting policies have been
designed to hide the growth of government spending. Famously, Congress
has decreed that a reduction in planned spending growth should be deemed
a spending cut. On top of that, Congress has deemed some spending
"uncontrollable," a category that now includes a majority of the federal
budget.

The underlying reality that neither political party wants to address
is that three programs account for roughly 60 percent of the federal
budget. Those programs are Social Security, National Security and
Medicare, and they include automatic spending increases every single
year. There is simply no way to reduce government spending without
addressing these three budget items. And if long-term fixes are not
implemented, there is no way taxes can be raised enough to cover the
spending.

These are the challenges our elected politicians prefer to avoid:
finding a way to put consumers in charge of health care choices and
reforming the three programs that drive federal spending.

Their failure to address these realities is the reason we are stuck with petty partisan bickering over shutdowns and websites.

What Happened to All of Obama's Technology Czars?

Why
does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its
wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's
myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers
got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology
for their money?

Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama's top government titans
of information technology. As usual, "screw up, move up" is standard
bureaucratic operating procedure.

Let's start with the "federal chief information officer." In 2009,
Obama named then 34-year-old "whiz kid" Vivek Kundra to the post
overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending. At 21, Kundra was
convicted of misdemeanor theft. He stole a handful of men's shirts from a
J.C. Penney's department store and ran from police in a failed attempt
to evade arrest. Whitewashing the petty thief's crimes, Obama instead
effused about his technology czar's "depth of experience in the
technology arena."

Just as he was preparing to take the federal job, an FBI search warrant
was issued at Kundra's workplace. He was serving as the chief
technology officer of the District of Columbia. Two of Kundra's
underlings, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, were charged in an alleged
scheme of bribery, kickbacks, ghost employees and forged timesheets.
Kundra went on leave for five days and was then reinstated after the
feds informed him that he was neither a subject nor a target of the
investigation.

As I noted in my 2009 book, "Culture of Corruption," city and federal
watchdogs had identified a systemic lack of controls in Kundra's office.
Veteran D.C. newspaper columnist Jonetta Rose Barras reported that Acar
"was consistently promoted by his boss, Vivek Kundra, receiving with
each move increasing authority over sensitive information and operating
with little supervision." Yet, Team Obama emphasized that Kundra had no
idea what was going on in his workplace, which employed about 300
workers.

A mere 29 months after taking the White House job, Kundra left for a
cushy fellowship at Harvard University. In January 2012, he snagged an
executive position at Salesforce.com, which touted his "demonstrated
track record of driving innovation."

In 2011, Obama appointed former Microsoft executive and FCC managing
director Steven VanRoekel to succeed Kundra. At the time, he promised
"to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be
applied to the model that is government." Mission not accomplished.

Next up: Obama's "U.S. chief technology officer." In May 2009, the
president appointed Aneesh Chopra "to promote technological innovation
to help the country meet its goals such as job creation, reducing health
care costs and protecting the homeland. Together with Chief Information
Officer Vivek Kundra, their jobs are to make the government more
effective, efficient and transparent."

Chopra's biggest accomplishment? A humiliating cameo in December 2009
on "The Daily Show" with liberal comedian Jon Stewart, who mocked the
administration's pie-in-the-sky Open Government Initiative. Chopra
resigned three years later, ran unsuccessfully for Virginia lieutenant
governor and now works as a "senior fellow" at the far-left Center for
American Progress, which is run by former Clinton administration hit man
turned Obama helpmate John Podesta.

Obama replaced Chopra with Todd Park, the former "chief technology
officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services." The White
House described him as a "change agent and 'entrepreneur-in-residence,'
helping HHS harness the power of data, technology and innovation to
improve the health of the nation." Park oversees the "Presidential
Innovation Fellows" program and is also a "senior fellow" in health IT
and health reform policy at Podesta's Center for American Progress. CAP
has tirelessly defended Obamacare and its global joke of an IT
infrastructure.

In 2010, when President Obama first rolled out a dog-and-pony
demonstration of Healthcare.gov, Park basked in the glow of positive
media coverage. He bragged to TechCrunch.com about working "24/7 ... in a
very, very nimble hyper consumer focused way ... all fused in this kind
of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew and all-nighters, and you know,
idealism."

It was, as you all now know, all hype and glory. So who has Obama
called in to oversee the HealthCare.gov rescue mission? None other than
the administration's "change agent and entrepreneur-in-residence," CTO
Todd Park, who helped build the broken system in the first place!

Obamacare also created the "Bureau of Health Information" and a new
"assistant secretary of health information," who coordinates with a
separate "national coordinator for health information technology"
overseeing the equally disastrous electronic medical records mandate.
Harvard University's David Blumenthal held the post from 2009 to 2011
before returning to his Ivy League home.

Then came Farzad Mostashari, who was "at the forefront of the
administration's health IT efforts and is a resource to the entire
health system to support the adoption of health information technology
and the promotion of nationwide health information exchange to improve
health care." In August 2013, Mostashari announced his resignation, and
earlier this month, he became a "visiting fellow" at the Brookings
Institution's Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, waste our money screwing things up
and then run back to academia to train the next generation of
incompetent technocrats.

Jesus was not a Palestinian

by Christine Williams (Posted in Jihad Watch)

It is not a new phenomenon that Jesus has been called a Palestinian,
but in a recent article in Canada’s Toronto Star, the subject is
presented with an attack on irredeemable racists in the Church, who
supposedly have a preference for “blue eyed” whites.

For 39 years, whenever I applied for a church position, an
intellectually inferior, academically incompetent, or spiritually
bankrupt person with “blue eyes” was hired ….Once I told an interfaith
gathering that, when I cross the street at Yonge & Bloor, folks
don’t see my clerical collar, just another bloody Paki…… Tools of
ecclesiastical rejection are so polished that one suspects divine
intervention. Why are ‘good’ Christians so irredeemably more racist than
their cousins outside the church? Incidentally, Jesus, the Palestinian,
didn’t have blue eyes.

The “ethically speaking columnist” concludes with these less-than-subtle words that relate to “Jesus, the Palestinian”: “So
if the church doesn’t want your considerable talents, follow the advice
of the brown-eyed Jesus: shake the dust off your feet and move on.”

While this column attempts to cover a thorny issue of racism in the
Church, declaring Jesus to be Palestinian will bring no resolution. It
is also historically flawed at best, propagandist at worst.

In exploring some of the roots of how and where Jesus (Yeshua in
Hebrew) came to be deemed a Palestinian, the Israeli monitoring agency
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) exposed a Palestinian Authority TV interview in which author Samih Ghanadreh from Nazareth was asked about his new book Christianity and its Connection to Islam.
Ghanadeh states that he personally heard Yasser Arafat several times
affirm that Jesus was the first Palestinian martyr, while the TV Host
replies:

“Jesus was a Palestinian, no one denies that …” PMW cited the
regularity of this declaration by prominent Palestinians, including the Governor of Ramallah Leila Ghannam (“We all have the right to be proud that Jesus is a Palestinian”), Senior PA leader Jibril Rajoub (“The greatest Palestinian in history since Jesus is Yasser Arafat”), and an editorial in the PA official daily -- Al-Hayat Al-Jadida -- referred to the “holy Trinity” as being Arafat, Abbas and Jesus.

In this Palestinian creation of the “Holy Trinity” now resides
Mahmoud Abbas, who did his PhD in Holocaust denial, and Rahman Abdul
Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini (a.k.a. Yasser Arafat), who learned under the
tutelage of his revered uncle the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini,
who worked with Hitler and Adolph Eichmann to slaughter six million
Jews. Now Jesus -- the holy deity to the world’s Christians, known as
“the Prince of Peace” -- has been thrown into this pile.

Bible researcher and author Jim Fletcher
wrote that “the revisionists originally were the usual suspects:
Arafat, mainline church scholars, media types.“ But more gravely, he
states that this revisionism “burrowed-into the American evangelical
community.” For example:

Assemblies of God minister and Palmer Theological Seminary Professor
Paul Alexander referred to Jesus as “the Palestinian Jew” and has asked: “What will it take for the world to care enough to end the occupation?”

Fletcher further states that some evangelical leaders are advancing
the false narratives of the likes of Arafat and the PLO, whether they
are doing it knowingly or unknowingly. Although Fletcher asserted that
popular Christian author Philip Yancey referred to Jesus as a
“Palestinian rabbi,” Yancey was also cited in another article "Unwrapping Jesus,"
in which he stated unequivocally that Jesus was a Jew, even though he
describes Jesus walking “the dusty roads of Palestine.” Yancey explains
that the “true-blue Jewishness” of Jesus leaps out from Matthew’s very
first sentence, which introduces him as “the son of David, the son of
Abraham.”

For those who believe that there is a legitimate historic ancient Palestinian claim to the Holy Land, no such data even exists.The Romans coined
the term itself. Following the Jewish revolt and ancient Battle of
Masada, the term “Palestine” was invented in 135 AD for the sole purpose
of delegitimizing and dishonoring the Jewish presence in the Holy Land.
Before that, the land was known as “Judah.”

Then in 636 AD, the Ottoman
Arab raiders came to the land and uprooted Jews during the Battle of
Yarmouk between the Rashidun Caliphate and the armies of the Roman
Empire. Yet they did not form any Arab nation there, let alone a
"Palestinian" one. The term “Palestine”
was applied to the territory that was placed under the British Mandate
after World War I, and Arabs from the vast surrounding lands populated
it. Then in 1964, the PLO was created under the leadership of
Palestinian lawyer, Ahmed Shukheiry, at a conference in East Jerusalem
attended by Arab foreign ministers. Its founding manifesto stated that
it was formed “to attain the objective of liquidating Israel.”

History proclaims the fallacy of Christians who claim that Jesus was
Palestinian. This is not to say that Jesus is not a recognized figure in
Islam. He is considered a messenger of God and a prophet called Isa --
and also a Jew, “sent to the children of Israel.”

Returning to the Toronto Star article and the discussion of racism
being perpetrated in the Church:

Jesus was a Jew, born in the Biblical
heartlands. Christianity advanced into Egypt in the early part of the
first century AD, as can be traced to the ancient Christian Copts of the
Patriarchate of Alexandria, following the martyrdom of St. Mark. Any
racism problem that exists within the Church is a separate issue
altogether that needs to be addressed, and it will not be solved by
falsely declaring Jesus to be a Palestinian. To do so advances the cause
of Arafat and the PLO – Jihadists who virulently hate the West and whose mission remains to “liquidate Israel.”

I’m
leading a coalition of human rights activists and advocates for fiscal
responsibility who have submitted an ad to the MTA to run the week
before the election, telling the truth about the front runner in the New
York mayoral race, Bill de Blasio. And the media is in a frenzy.

The
ad is necessary because the mainstream media is not telling New Yorkers
the disturbing details of de Blasio’s career, associations, and plans
for the city. And now, because of the mainstream media’s hatred for the
truth and desire to get de Blasio into office, it has gone viral.

We held a press conference Thursday
that was widely announced to expose the subversive, seditious and
Communist candidate for New York mayor. We exposed de Blasio’s Marxist
and terrorist ties. Cliff Kincaid organized an intense debriefing on de
Blasio’s subversive past. Two and half hours packed with information,
documentaion and news. Here is an 84-page leave behind from the event.

Concerned
New Yorkers attended, but there was no media present, with the
exception of Jennifer Fermino from the New York Daily News. If a
Soros-funded group like Media Matters or the Center for American
Progress had announced that it was holding a press conference to expose
Joe Lhota, there would have been a stampede.

Did
Fermino report on any of the blockbuster research on de Blasio? Not a
word. The media won’t cover the shady, subversive history of Bill de
Blasio, aka Warren Wilhelm. They won’t ask him about Ortega, Castro,
Arafat, etc., or what he was doing in Cuba, Nicaragua, etc.

But
Fermino did report on our ad, busying herself not with looking into de
Blasio’s positions and associations, but with trying to smear and insult
me. As did New York Magazine, which called me the “subway uglifier.”

No matter. New York Magazine is running our ad. It gets the message out. Pretty or not.

The
objective of the Stop Red Bill ad campaign is to get the news that the
media ignores out to the voter. They won’t cover it, and they preen
about that. It’s funny. The media reminds me of the hunchback who can’t
see its own hunch. They are so biased, they practically boast about it.

Is
it any wonder that the subversive Sandinista is leading in the polls by
50 points? De Blasio’s huge lead speaks to a larger problem: not just
the low-information voter, but the no-information voter.

This
is why we created the Stop Red Bill committee, and we will be running
advertisements across the New York City transit system.

Bill
de Blasio has said that he will not allow surveillance of jihadi
suspects and terror mosques. This although two New Yorkers were charged
with plotting jihad terror attacks in the last week. And since 9/11,
there have been plots against the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway system,
the Stock Exchange, Citigroup headquarters, the Garment District, the
PATH train, JFK Airport, Long Island Railroad, synagogues in the Bronx
and Manhattan, Times Square, and more.

De
Blasio has a great deal to hide: he has had a number of aliases and
name changes.

And it’s not surprising that he would want to cover up his
past. He has aided the brutal Communist Sandinistas and ‘Palestinian’
jihadists, although he has scrubbed that from his website. He even
supported the bloodthirsty President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Newly
available documents from his years on the New York City Council years
show him interfering with the work of the Manhattan district attorney
when a New York teacher named Steve Quester was facing prison for
working with jihad terrorists in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Quester called
suicide bombers “desperate and hopeless” and said that “all the
heartbreak flows directly from Israel’s policy” of “occupying the
Palestinian territories.”And he recently appeared at a Muslims for de
Blasio rally with Linda Sarsour, who has called Zionism “racism.”

His
plans to increase taxes are the death knell of the city. The fact is,
nearly half this city’s job growth has come from health care and social
services. Who’s going to pay for it if he kills the businessman?

We have also started a website, StopRedBill.com, that provides further documentation of these assertions.

Don’t Let Obama Get Away With It

The funniest editorial cartoon I’ve seen this week shows a
White House aide talking to Barack Obama in the Oval Office. In the
first panel, he says, “The focus now shifts from the Republicans’ poorly
thought-out plan to defund Obamacare.”

And the second panel concludes, “… to our poorly thought-out plan to implement it.”

Can you believe what a disaster the launch of the badly misnamed
Affordable Care Act is turning out to be? It seems that the reality is
even worse than many critics predicted.

Now the Democrats are scrambling to figure out how to keep the whole
mess from causing even more damage, such as losing control of the Senate
in next year’s elections. Faced with the massive unpopularity of the
scheme, the last thing on Earth the Democrats want is for Obamacare to
be the key issue in those elections. Let’s make sure it is.

Obama gave a press conference in the White House Rose Garden this
past Monday, to promise that things would get better. There were 13
smiling people lined up behind him, all of them said to be shining
examples of how successful his healthcare plan could be.

Guess what? Turns out that none of them had actually purchased health
insurance through Obamacare. In fact, only three of them had even
completed the application process.

These dismal numbers should come as no surprise. TheWashington Post reports
that while 4.7 million people tried to log on to Healthcare.gov, the
official website for Obamacare, in the first 24 hours after it opened,
fewer than 10 people — that’s right: 10 people — actually succeeded in buying health insurance.

Consumer Reports, the respected product-testing company, says
that of 9.5 million people who attempted to register in the first week,
only 271,000 were able to do so. And “register” doesn’t mean they bought
health insurance. No, it only means they were patient enough and
determined enough to navigate an unbelievably complicated, confusing and
error-prone application process.

Meanwhile, in Florida some 300,000 customers of Florida Blue are
being notified that their health insurance is being cancelled and that
they need to sign up for Obamacare. In California, Kaiser Permanente
sent similar notices to 160,000 people — half of the number it used to
insure. In Pennsylvania, Independence Blue Cross says it will cancel
about 45 percent of its policyholders there. The same thing is happening
in State after State.

It now appears that more people are going to lose the health
insurance they have than will buy new policies under Obamacare. So much
for Obama’s promise that “if you like your health insurance, you can
keep it.”

After analyzing the problems with the ObamaCare website, Consumer Reports
offered this startling advice to its readers: “Stay away.” Because of
all the software glitches, the magazine said that readers should not try
to use the Healthcare.gov website “for at least another month, if you
can.” And it added, “Hopefully that will be long enough for its software
vendors to clean up the mess that they’ve made.”

Sure thing. In that Rose Garden pep talk, Obama said, “Nobody’s
madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as
it should, which means it’s going to get fixed.”

But how soon? And at what cost?

Two years ago, when CGI Federal, an information technology firm, was
awarded the contract to build the website, it estimated that costs could
be as high as $93.7 million to get it up and running. Now, the
Government Accountability Office says that we taxpayers have poured out
more than $390 million, with millions of dollars more still to be spent.
The GAO estimates that another $150 million has been spent on
administrative costs associated with implementing Obamacare.

That’s more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds that the
Obama Administration has squandered so far in perpetrating this
job-killing boondoggle on the American public.

To put these numbers in perspective, consider that it took Facebook
over six years, from 2004 to 2010, to reach total expenditures of $500
million. During that time, it grew to several hundred million active
users. (It now has more than a billion.)

Twitter, which handles more than 340 million tweets a day, operated
from 2006 to 2011 with just $360 million in funding. LinkedIn and
Spotify, two other hugely popular networking sites, have raised just
$200 million and $288 million, respectively.

But this is government we’re talking about. It is any surprise that it costs so much and performs so badly?

Now come reports that government officials knew the Obamacare site wasn’t ready. The Washington Post reports
that when the site was tested, several days before the official launch:
“It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried
to log on simultaneously.”

Mike Barnicle of MSNBC, which can usually find no fault with the President, sounds like a Personal Liberty
contributor in his interpretation of what’s going on. “They’re lying
about it now,” he says.

“They’re not depriving us of information, they
are outright lying.”

TheWall Street Journal says the catastrophe is the
result of deliberate decisions by the Obama Administration. “This isn’t
some coding error, or even the Health and Human Service Department’s
usual incompetence,” the paper editorialized. “The failures that have
all but disabled Obamacare are the result of deliberate policy choices,
which HHS and the White House are compounding with secrecy and
stonewalling.”

Remember when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius
said that the reason the servers were crashing all of the time was
because of unexpectedly high demand? She called it “a great problem to
have.”

Now her biggest assignment is to protect her boss from the
catastrophe that is taking place. She wants us all to believe he had no
way of knowing how quickly things would go so badly.

Human Events senior writer John Hayward calls this “the
Incompetence Defense.” He says that’s what happens “when embattled
officials insist they are blameless because they were clueless. They had
no idea what their underlings were up to.”

Faced with this growing embarrassment, you can expect the
powers-that-be to offer the same solution to the Obamacare fiasco that
they did to their last contrived crisis, the debt-ceiling debacle: Kick
the can down the road.

Obama has already delayed the employer mandate in Obamacare by a
year, even though there was no authority in the Constitution or the
hugely unpopular law for him to do so.

Expect him to do so again for the individual mandate. But this time,
many in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, say they’ll go along with
him. Even Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said he’ll offer legislation to delay
the implementation of Obamacare for a year.

Conservatives should refuse to go along with this — not if we want
Obamacare to be the deciding issue in next November’s elections. And
what better? One-third of the Senate (including some very vulnerable
Democrats) will face the voters then, along with every member of the
House.

Let’s make those elections a massive referendum on this disastrous
government takeover of our healthcare system. A majority of voters say
they don’t like Obamacare. And that they want to toss out every
incumbent in Washington. Let’s give them a chance to do so.

It seems to NEVER end for this administration…for this president…and
yet he remains in office NO matter what improprieties come to light.
Everything Obama does seems to roll off him…to roll of him as his
cohorts and minions circle their wagons around the man the media
anointed as the great black ‘savior’ of us all.

Scandal after scandal…lie after lie…shame after shame have
surfaced…led off with Fast & Furious…Benghazi…IRS targeting
conservatives…spying on ‘We the People’…shootings deemed workplace
violence that are anything but..a farce of a government
shutdown…defaming and dishonoring our vets…debt ceiling woes…and crying
the sky will fall if we default on notes due.

And let’s NOT forget all the ObamaCare lies NOT only about the ACA
itself, but the lies surrounding the nightmare of a government sign-up
website that simply does NOT work…a website federal officials failed to
fully test even after one small test crashed the site.

In fact yesterday, Senior Vice President Cheryl Campbell of
contractor CGI Federal, in testifying before the House Energy and
Commerce Committee…the committee investigating the website’s
failures…said the HealthCare.gov site should have been tested for
months before it went live, and that her company informed the White
House there were operational problems with the website BEFORE it
debuted on October 1st, and yet the White House did NOTHING about it.

And so the Obama White House chose NOT to delay its rollout because
that would have delayed Obama’s causing ‘We the People’ pain…something
he so likes to do.

Obama’s namesake healthcare bill is his hallmark piece of
legislation…that’s what he keeps telling us…the highlight of his
legacy…and he is protecting it like a mother lion protects her cubs…yet
his legacy now seems to be tarnished…maybe even beyond repair…and
rightly so.

So is Obama fainting yet from all the lies…from all the
cover-ups…from all the shame that is HealthCare.gov…phony fainting for
the camera like his Rose Garden prop did a few short days ago. NO of
course NOT as his narcissistic self would NEVER allow that, yet true
to form in the midst of this political circus of horrors and hyped-up
on his self-perceived victory in raising the debt ceiling, the
‘anointed one’ is hightailing it out of DC to hit the campaign trail for eight
fundraising events over the next few weeks for House and Senate
Democrats running in 2014.

Leaving the fallout in DC
behind…running away like the coward he
is…leaving others to shoulder the blame and to clean up his mess…yet
maybe this ObamaCare mess just got a bit too big for even his cronies to
clean for right on cue enter center stage yet another diversion to try
and force us to look away. But this diversion can have major
ramifications as it’s a major breach of trust x 35…for it seems Barack
HUSSEIN Obama has been a bad boy again as the NSA has been
monitoring…and the final orders to do so could only have come from the
top…the personal phone calls of at least 35 world leaders.

NOT good…NOT good at all.

And who exposed this yet another scandal in the making…none other
than whistle-blower Edward Snowden who in a classified document revealed
that after being given phone numbers by an official in another
government department, senior officials in ‘customer’ departments such
the White House and the Pentagon were “encouraged" to share their
contact list details with the NSA…the infamous spying on ‘We the People’
National Security Agency...who then added the phone numbers of world leaders to their
surveillance lists and then started to ‘spy’ on them…to ‘spy’...to listen in on...to bug their
personal phone calls…a breach of recognized diplomatic protocol.

And wouldn’t it be quite interesting to see Vladimir Putin’s name on that list.

200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders…many allies and friends
including the leaders of Brazil, Mexico, and France…and Germany’s
Chancellor Angela Merkel who was the first of the 35 to come forward and
who is anything but happy about this…as I’m sure the others will NOT be
as their names come to light. Yet the Obama White House denied
listening in on Merkel’s phone calls saying that the US government “is
not monitoring and will not monitor” her phone calls.

So then why did Obama mouthpiece Jay Carney issue a statement saying,
‘The [NSA] revelations have clearly caused tension in our relationships
with some countries, and we are dealing with that through diplomatic
channels. These are very important relations both economically and for
our security, and we will work to maintain the closest possible ties.”

Hmmm…Obama denies monitoring has been going on yet Carney admits it
has been. I wonder if Carney will now be called to task for
contradicting the ‘anointed one’…called to task just like the low-level
government worker with the Twitter account criticizing Obama was…as in
he was fired. We just might be getting a new press secretary pretty
soon with the excuse that he is moving on to a private sector position.

And rest assured all this will surely be the albatross around the
neck of the upcoming EU summit in Brussels as beyond furious European
leaders have threatened to delay or outright cancel important trade
negotiations with us, and have even hinted that this could very well
disrupt the joint counter-terrorism collaborations currently in place.